But at the time of Colonel Crofton’s death, his sister had been truly kind.  She had telegraphed L200 to her sister-in-law from Italy, and this sum of ready money had been very useful during that tragic week—­and even afterwards, for the insurance people had made a certain amount of fuss after Colonel Crofton’s sad suicide, “while of unsound mind,” and this had caused a disagreeable delay.

The new tenant of The Trellis House had her lonely dinner brought in to her on a tray, and then, perhaps rather too soon—­for she was not much of a reader, and there was nothing to while away the time—­she went upstairs to her pleasant, cosy bedroom, and so to bed.

But, try as she might, she found it impossible to fall asleep; for what seemed to her hours she lay wide awake, tossing this way and that.  At last she got up, and, drawing aside the chintz curtain across one of the windows, she looked out.  The window was open, and in the eerily bright moonlight the upper part of the hill on which Beechfield village lay seemed spread before her.  There were twinkling lights in many of the windows—­doubtless groups of happy, cheerful people behind them.  She felt horribly lonely and depressed as well as wide awake to-night.

In her short, healthy life, Enid Crofton had only had one attack of insomnia.  During the ten days that had followed her husband’s sudden death—­for the inquest had had to be put off for a day or two—­she had hardly slept at all, and the doctor who had been so kind a friend during that awful time, had had to give her a strong narcotic.  To his astonishment it had had no effect.  She had felt as if she were going mad—­the effect, so he had told her afterwards, of the awful shock she had had.

To-night she wondered with a kind of terror whether that terrible sleeplessness which had ended by making her feel almost lightheaded was coming back.

She turned away from the window, and, getting into bed again, tried to compose her limbs into absolute repose, as the doctor had advised her to do.  And then, just as she was mercifully going to sleep, there floated in, through the open window, a variant on a doggerel song she had last heard in Egypt:—­

  “The angels sing-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling,
     They’ve got the goods for me. 
   The bells of hell ring ting-a-ling-a-ling
     For you, as you shall see.”

Enid Crofton sat up in bed.  She felt suddenly afraid—­horribly, desperately afraid.  As is often the case with those who have drifted away from any form of religion, she was very superstitious, and terrified of evil omens.  During the War she had been fond of going first to one and then to another of the fashionable sooth-sayers.

They had all agreed as to one thing—­this was that her husband would die, and of course she had thought he would be killed at the Front.  But he had come through safe and sound, and more—­more hateful than ever.